Will he or won't he? Putin and eastern Ukraine

Saturday, April 12, 2014

That's the big question this weekend, isn't it? Will Russia attack eastern Ukraine, splitting off still more territory from that country?

For the Putin of ten years ago, I'd say no way. That Putin was much too smart to do something like this. For Putin 2014, however, I can't say I'm sure. As Angela Merkel seemed to imply in her account of her telephone discussion with Putin the weekend of the Crimea takeover, the Russian president may well be living in an alternate reality. Bill Simmons, meanwhile, would probably say that Putin is just having his "I'm Keith Hernandez" moment.

So, maybe Putin has completely gone off the rails, because I think that is what it would take for him to actually think that invading eastern Ukraine would be a good idea. There are, however, some other possibilities. The most likely, in my opinion, is that Putin is getting dragged into something that he may not have initially wanted.

People in the United States and elsewhere often speak about Putin as if he were some kind of omnipotent being, capable of almost anything. But Putin is hardly a one-man show. He has his backers, power magnates that he has to appease. We can see what happens, in the case of Turkey, when the folks in government don't sufficiently share the pie with their behind-the-scenes supporters. So rather than completely personalize the issue around Putin, we also need to think about the people around him. Presumably, war in eastern Ukraine would suit somebody's interests, if not ultimately those of either Putin or Russia.

Something else to consider is that the massing of Russian troops on the border may have begun as a means of pressuring Ukraine into quickly giving up Crimea. I mention this because, in addition to the fact that invading eastern Ukraine would be a terrible idea for everybody concerned, this week's developments strike me as rather different from those which occurred in Crimea in late February. Back then, the takeover of public buildings and hoisting of Russian flags in Crimea was followed almost immediately by professional, insignia-free troops. Everything had seemed very coordinated and organized, and people had moved quickly.

The events taking place this week, by contrast, have seemed much more ad hoc. There may well be Russian agents among the building occupiers, but there also seem to be many locals. The smooth operation characterizing the Crimea takeover has simply not been replicated in Kharkiv, Donetsk and other cities in eastern Ukraine, where the stand-offs between occupiers and the Ukrainian police seem much less...professional than had been the case in Crimea.

For what it's worth, my sense is that, if Russia does go into eastern Ukraine, it will be because Putin's been dragged into it by a) the actions of locals in eastern Ukraine and b) financial and political partners and supporters in Russia who stand to benefit from taking over these regions.

As I've written before, going into Ukraine would be a real mess. In Crimea, there was one reported fatality. But Crimea is different from eastern Ukraine in that Crimea was already a 'mini-republic' that had been previously transferred between Russia and Ukraine. In eastern Ukraine, by contrast, people would need to carve out a new border.

How do you do that? According to population. So, if you push people out of territory, you get to place that land within the country of your choice. That's ethnic cleansing, and if the question of re-drawing Ukraine's border becomes a real one in eastern Ukraine, conditions would be ripe for conflict on a level that I think no one would have imagined a short time ago.

The sort of bloody, extended conflict that could result from a Russian military invasion of eastern Ukraine, and the potential consequences of this destabilization upon the literally dozens of republics, regions and other districts (many of which are ethnically-based) making up the Russian Federation, are not, I think, what Putin had in mind when the annexation of Crimea began in late February.

Lots of people in the United States have been asking what the US and other countries should do in response to these developments. Part of the problem with looking at the Ukrainian crisis in these terms, however, is that there is an assumption within them that this crisis began over the last couple of months. In fact, the situation in Ukraine is just the latest chapter in a battle for influence that the US and Russia have been waging since the end of the Cold War. Almost all of these conflicts, moreover, have taken place on the territory of friends, neighbors, former allies, and client-states of Russia.

NATO in 1989 (in green).

Today's NATO and Partnership for Peace

Think about it: since the end of the Cold War, all of the USSR's former Warsaw Pact allies in central and eastern Europe have become members of a US-based military alliance. Then, former members of the USSR (the three Baltic states) began joining NATO as well. The 'color revolutions' of the 2000s overthrew, or threatened to overthrow, a series of rulers that were close to Moscow, while former Soviet client states in Iraq and Syria became targets for American attack. When the G. W. Bush administration proposed a defense shield in the Czech Republic, ostensibly to protect Europe from Iran, Putin argued that the US and Russia build it together and base it in Azerbaijan, on Iran's northern border. Nobody took him seriously.

Well, I guess people take Putin more seriously now. But other than wondering about the wisdom of having blown off Russian security concerns for the past twenty years, it's also worth thinking about the consequences for the people living in these countries. Georgia and Ukraine have been literally torn apart by this competition. Things could get a lot worse before they get better.

The best thing the United States could do in response to this week's developments would be to keep a strong eye on American interests. Rather than fall into knee-jerk competition with Russia, we need to consider what this is all worth to the United States. This doesn't mean that the US should ignore Putin's behavior or appease it, but I think Obama has been right to keep his cool. As the US discovered in Iraq, stuff like this has a tendency to come back around and bite people in the ass. In
the long run, I think that direct Russian involvement in a conflict in
eastern Ukraine could end up turning into a real quagmire for Putin.

And while that might be fine for Putin, it won't be for the people in Ukraine. Regardless of their political sympathies right now, people in the region would likely suffer as a result of any move to change borders by force. First in Georgia, now in Ukraine, local populations are the big losers in US-Russian competition for influence in former Soviet space. More than anything, I think that's what we ought to be thinking about right now.

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From the Borderlands Lodge...

I am an historian of the Turkic World with over 20 years of experience living in and writing about Turkey and the former USSR. My first impressions of the region came when I was working as an English teacher in Istanbul from 1992-1999. During these years I traveled extensively in the Balkans, Turkey, the former USSR, the Middle East and Asia, and studied Russian and Hungarian in addition to Turkish before returning to the US to pursue a graduate education.

After receiving an MA and PhD from Princeton and Brown universities, I held research fellowships with the NEH/American Research Institute in Turkey, the Harriman Institute at Columbia University, and the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, DC. Since August of 2009 I have been a professor of Islamic World History at Montana State University in the cool little ski town of Bozeman, MT, holding the rank of associate professor since 2015. My first book, Turks Across Empires: Marketing Muslim Identity in the Russian-Ottoman Borderlands, was published by Oxford University Press in November of 2014.

I am spending the 2016-2017 academic year in Russia through the support of a Fulbright research scholar grant.

Find me on...

Turks Across Empires

Oxford University Press, 2014

Reviews of Turks Across Empires

"...path-breaking...Meyer demonstrates brilliantly the shifts in articulation of cultural and political identities as well as change of the specific vocabulary in the written texts of the Turkic intellectuals."--Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas

"...a skillfully crafted and soundly constructed account...Meyer's book is a page-turner, admittedly not a common trait in scholarly history works. It frequently turns into a sort of amusement park for historians, where the author parades so many newly unearthed, rich in detail, and immensely informative archival documents...finely tackles somewhat delicate yet thorny matters such as Turkism, Pan-Turkism, Ottomanism, and Islamism, as well as addresses the lives of humans who were doomed and perished or sometimes enriched and saved by those very same matters." --American Historical Review

"This thoroughly researched monograph offers a noteworthy caveat to the infatuation with 'identity' that for almost two decades characterized the post-Soviet scholarship on the non-Russian peoples of the Russian and Soviet empires...Meyer leaves us convinced that discourses and claims of identity need to be understood in relation to concrete power configurations and resulting opportunities, and not as articulations of perennial or even would-be nationhood." -- Russian Review

"James Meyer's Turks across Empires is a very valuable and intriguing reassessment of the origins of pan-Turkism through an in-depth examination of some of its leading figures...a great pleasure to read...Meyer's book is 'revisionist' in the sense that it successfully challenges many assumptions and arguments in the study of Russia's Muslims and pan-Turkism...provides a more complete, flesh-and-bone biographical reconstruction of these intellectuals and their milieu...the depiction of Kazan Tatars as 'insider Muslims' of Tsarist Russia is simply brilliant."--Turkish Review

"[Turks Across Empires] presents a wealth of information drawn from archives, periodical publications, memoirs, and other documentary evidence in the languages needed for such a study: Ottoman, Russian, Tatar, and the Turkic of Azerbaijan... As a result, Meyer’s narrative fills in gaps and makes connections that nicely complement the steadily expanding literature on the late Ottoman/late Romanov period and the Turks who shaped their own and wider Turkic identities in that era. By extension, the identity question has profound implications for twentieth and even twenty-first century intellectual and political trajectories."--Review of Middle East Studies

"Based on an impressive array of sources from Turkey, Russia, Ukraine, Georgia and Azerbaijan, James Meyer’s monograph not only expands the knowledge about the Muslims of Russia but also provides a widely applicable argument about instrumentalization of identity in different political contexts." --Council for European Studies

"James Meyer pursues an imaginative approach to the final decades of the Russian and Ottoman Empires by focusing on the biographies of three activists—a Crimean Tatar, an Azerbaijani, and a Volga Tatar—who, while born in Russia, were men with substantial interest and experi- ence traveling to and living in the empire’s southern neighbor. Biography becomes, thus, the modus operandi for unraveling the roles of these and similar men—“trans-imperial people,” as Meyer calls them—in propagating pan-Turkism and suggesting it as a new identity for Turks, who were also overwhelmingly Muslim, everywhere."--Slavic Review

"A major contribution of this work is its use of original source material in Turkish, Ottoman Turkish and Russian. Using personal correspondence and Ottoman and Russian tsarist era archives, Meyer traces four distinct periods to their trans-imperial existence moving back and forth between Istanbul, Kazan, Crimea, and Azerbaijan...an important contribution in several ways."--Turkish Area Studies Review

"…the book does a very good job in bringing the complexities ofRussia’s Muslim intellectual life of the late imperial period close to a readership broadly interested in the modernization of Russia’s peripheries and in Russian-Ottoman relations… Meyer convincingly demonstrates that since the 1870s Muslim communities in inner Russia perceived the state as a threat, especially in view of the administrative attempts at taking control over Muslim schools."--Journal of World History

"...impressive...James Meyer’s book is a collective biography of the most prominent pan-Turkists—Yusuf Akçura (1876–1935), Ahmet Ağaoğlu (1869–1939), and İsmail Gasprinskii (1851–1914)—by means of which the author reveals the patterns of migration from the Middle Volga, Southeast Caucasus, and Crimea to the Ottoman lands and back, as well as local politics in each protagonist’s original region…The fruit of this admirable exercise is most visible when Meyer demonstrates the simultaneous formation of population policy on both the Russian and Ottoman shores of the Black Sea."--Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History

"Few Ottomanists understand the complexities of the situation of Muslims in the Russian Empire, while scholars of the Russian Empire have tended to imagine the Ottoman Empire only in broad brushstrokes. Meyer is one of a small new crop of scholars who possess the requisite skills…The narrative is richly documented and thick—perhaps the best account of Volga–Ural public life in English…" --International Journal of Middle East Studies

"Meyer, assistant professor of Islamic world history at Montana State University, draws from Turkish, Georgian, Azerbaijani, and Russian archives to bridge the gap between borderlands and peoples in this innovative study of the origins of pan-Turkism. Tautly argued and empirically grounded, the book highlights the diverse nature of identity formulation during the late imperial era, when the forces of modernity presented new challenges to traditional religious communities".--Canadian Slavonic Papers

"Turks Across Empires is deeply-researched, drawing on sources in Russian and multiple Turkic languages from no fewer than thirteen archives in the former Soviet Union and Turkey. This research is showcased beautifully in chapter one (‘Trans-Imperial People’), which is a superb, groundbreaking introduction to the large demographic of Muslims who — like Akcura, Gasprinskii and Agaoglu — moved between the Russian and Ottoman Empires"--Slavonic and East European Review